CHAPTER 19
On the road back to the motel, Carver didn’t notice the flashing red and blue lights in his rearview mirror. There was too much glare from the sun.
The sudden wail of a siren, abruptly cut off as if a hand had been clamped over a screaming mouth, startled him.
He checked the Olds’s rearview mirror and saw a police car inches off his back bumper, its lightbar flashers rotating on its roof but simply not up to overpowering the intense tropical sunlight. Only when the cars passed through dappled shade were the flashing lights even noticeable.
Carver braked the Olds and swerved to the side of the road, feeling the car’s right front wheel go off the gravel and sink slightly into marshy ground beyond the shoulder.
The police car had pulled in behind the Olds, as if it had been towed there by a string between the two vehicles. Carver sat quietly and watched it in the mirror.
Chief Armont got out of the car, hitched up his belt, and walked up to lean on the passenger-side door of the Olds. The Olds’s canvas top was up; Armont crouched to peer in at Carver.
“Am I going to get a ticket,” Carver asked, “or is this just a warning?”
Armont’s beefy face was flushed, perspiring. It hadn’t taken him long after getting out of the air-conditioned cruiser to break into a sweat. “Neither,” he said. “I just want to talk to you. I knew you were leaving, so I figured I could catch you here driving back from your conversation with the DEA.”
“I could have hung around your office and waited for you,” Carver said. “If it’s still your office and not Burr’s.”
Armont chuckled. “Assertive bastard, ain’t he?” He settled down more comfortably with his elbows on the car door, where the window rolled down into it; that would leave nasty grooves in his arms, Carver thought.
“The fact is,” Armont said, “I got some information about twenty minutes ago that might interest you. That’s why I decided to try to catch up with you here, before you were on the road back north. It concerns our departed friend Silverio Lujan.”
“Why don’t you get in the car and sit down?” Carver suggested.
Armont shook his head; perspiration dripped from his chin. “Just as soon stand out here.” He folded his gnarled hands. “A few days ago the University of Florida called my office. They were worried about a naturalist from their faculty, a Professor Raymond Mackenzie. Mackenzie left last week to spend some time here in the Everglades, cataloging wildlife, or whatever naturalists do. He was supposed to phone a female student of his who he lives with, but he never called. She alerted the university, kept bugging them to inquire and stir up some kind of action. I drove out and found his campsite two days ago. His four-wheel-drive Jeep was parked next to his little camper trailer, but he wasn’t there. There were signs that he’d left suddenly some time ago. A rotting, half-eaten meal; the butane cookstove switched on, and out of fuel. Mackenzie hasn’t turned up since at his campsite, or been seen by anyone around here.”
Carver waited patiently for Armont to get to the point.
“I remembered something from Mackenzie’s campsite,” Armont said. “Footprints in the soft ground around there. So I drove out this morning and made casts of some of the prints. They match the sandals Silverio Lujan was wearing when he tried to kill you and got dead himself.”
Carver sat with his hands on the steering wheel, remembering Lujan coming at him with the knife.
Armont said, “They’re the kind of sandals whose soles are made from tire carcasses. The treadmarks are identical.”
“They sell a lot of those,” Carver said. “How do you know these were Lujan’s that made the campsite prints? Were they both B. F. Goodrich, or what?”
“Goodyear, actually. The one with the blimp. But they also have individual distinguishing marks on them. Lujan’s sandals made those prints. Whatever happened to Mackenzie, Lujan was out there at some point-during, before, or after. What I want to know from you, Carver, is had you ever had any contact with Mackenzie?”
“I never heard of him until a few minutes ago,” Carver said. “From you. Are you telling me you think Lujan killed him?”
“I’m not sure what to think right now,” Armont said. “There’s quicksand in that part of the swamp south of town. Sinkholes that go down deeper than imagination. A man could have an accident there, disappear for good. Even a trained naturalist like Mackenzie.”
“Still,” Carver said, “those sandal prints. It’s possible Lujan knifed him, maybe in a robbery, maybe for twisted sport, and there’s no connection between that and his attempt on my life.”
“Yeah,” Armont said, “it’s possible.” He didn’t seem to believe it. “Could be we’ll never know, with Lujan dead.” More perspiration dripped from his chin.
“Thanks for the information,” Carver said. He reached over and shook Armont’s hand.
Armont stood up straight, so that only his ample stomach was visible out the window. He slapped the canvas top of the car to get Carver’s attention. “You take care now,” he said, loud enough for Carver to hear.
Carver watched him walk back to the cruiser and get in.
Armont started the car immediately. Its tires kicked up mud and rock as it swerved back onto the road and accelerated past the parked Olds.
The chief tapped the horn and waved to Carver, an oddly wistful good-bye.
Carver sat for a while longer, thinking about what Armont had told him. Something had happened to the naturalist Mackenzie out there in the swamp. Considering Lujan’s history with knives, it wasn’t at all unlikely that Mackenzie and Carver were simply meant to be fellow victims, by chance and nothing more. Or Lujan might have visited the campsite but had nothing to do with Mackenzie’s disappearance.
Coincidence again? Hah!
Carver started the Olds and gunned the engine to free the right front wheel from the pull of the swamp.
It was almost noon when Carver and Edwina drove out of Solarville in the Olds and headed toward the main highway, then north. Not toward Del Moray but toward Orlando. Edwina wanted to get some of her things from Willis’s apartment, she’d said. Carver thought she probably wanted to visit the apartment to get a renewed sense of Willis, to make the ghost more real.
They stopped for a light lunch at a truck stop that served free orange and grapefruit juice in paper cups, then continued through the grove country with the Olds’s top raised to block the brooding tropical sun. Carver sat disconsolately behind the steering wheel, thinking about the night before and listening to flying insects smack against the windshield and meet sudden, unexpected oblivion.
In the rented Pontiac that followed the Olds were three men, well dressed in expensive if slightly flamboyant fashion, seated calmly in the air-conditioned oasis of the car’s spacious blue interior. They were large men, and each had about him the perfect stillness of the truly dangerous, the calmness of the carnivore conserving energy for the kill. Two of the men had been on the boat off the shore near Sun South when Carver was talking to Franks.
The three had spent most of their lives in Cuba. Hard lives, not without violence. They were Marielitos.
The driver, a bulky man with a receding hairline above a peasant’s sunbrowned face of blunt angles and planes, was Jorge Lujan. Silverio’s brother.
He liked knives and fire.
CHAPTER 20
About an hour after lunch they were close to Orlando. The smiling, sunny presence of Disney World began to make itself felt, radiating far beyond the Magic Kingdom. Signs began to give mileage and directions to the land of Mickey and Pluto and the Monorail. Carver stopped and filled the Olds’s tank at Gas World. A roadside shop with a display of clocks made from waxed slabs of cypress billed itself as Souvenir World. A produce stand not much larger than a phone booth was Citrus World. In the station wagon in front of the Olds, anywhere from four to six children (they were moving around inside the car too fast to count) all wore oversized mouse ears that kept getting knocked crooked on their small heads. The man and woman in the front seat took turns twisting awkwardly and shouting at the kids. Frantic World.